"Six Authors in Search of a Character, Part 2: Richard Wright" in ZYZZYVA

I'm very excited to announce the second installment of my ongoing essay series in ZYZZYVA Literary Magazine––the series is called "Six Authors in Search of a Character" and it explores the unusual and complicated psychology of writers portraying on screen characters they created in print. Part 2 tackles Richard Wright's appearance as "Bigger Thomas" in NATIVE SON (1951), in which Wright endures mental, physical, and social strain, onscreen and off, to finally adapt his novel for cinemas. If you missed the first installment (on Stephen King's appearance in CREEPSHOW), you can read it here.

Only now does it occur to me... STORM WARNING (1951)

Only now does it occur to me... I never thought I would see Hollywood dancing legend Ginger Rogers being brutalized by members of the Ku Klux Klan...

...and that said tableau would not be "kitschy," but instead would function as a small part of a wider, more profound, and all-too-relevant whole. 

Stuart Heisler's STORM WARNING (1951) is a noir-ish message picture and a late entry into the "B-movies depicting the dangers of hate groups in America" genre, which includes films like BLACK LEGION (1937), NATION AFLAME (1937), and LEGION OF TERROR (1936).

Ginger Rogers plays a dress model who's passing through the small town of Rockpoint, USA to visit her newlywed sister (Doris Day). That the studio chose Ginger and Doris to portray key figures in a serious assessment of American hate groups (which is, for the record, not a musical in any way, shape, or form) feels like kind of an artistic coup. [If you'd asked me two weeks ago if there existed a movie where Ginger Rogers was bullwhipped by Klansmen, I would have been incredulous. Even now, I can barely conceive of the idea.] In any event, Ginger is in town for approximately three minutes when she witnesses the Klan murdering a journalist.

 

For a film about the KKK, the aspect of racial prejudice exists mostly as an implication; we only explicitly see the KKK harming white people who threaten to expose or destroy them. It is an obvious blind spot for the film, but as far as old Hollywood goes, the fact that they are willing to spend 93 minutes attacking a hate group instead of 165 minutes glorifying it (see: 1915's A BIRTH OF A NATION, among others) shows definite progress.

When she goes to tell her sister about it, she recognizes her new brother-in-law as one of the Klan murderers. Using a melodramatic framework that recalls the Blanche DuBois/Stella/Stanley Kowalski dynamic in a STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE,

Doris Day as the suffering, dutiful wife, darkened by the shadow of her abuser (Steve Cochran)...

a man who uses power dynamics and outright intimidation...

...to extend his sphere of abusive influence,  illustrated through Elia Kazan-esque theatrical blocking.

Ginger struggles between the ideas of spilling what she knows to the relevant authorities and lying to protect her sister's domestic purgatory. And did I mention that the relevant authority in this instance––the district attorney who's trying to destroy the Klan once and for all––is portrayed by none other than an eyebrow-indicating Ronald Reagan?

Facing external threat and familial guilt, Ginger stays quiet for a while, and the film takes advantage of her uncertainty to twist the knife; laying out an excellent case for why hate groups must rely on secrecy, the threat of violence, the silence of the good, and the indifference of the rational.

Here's a Klan member condescendingly explaining all the "good" they do:

And here's two Klansmen fearing what will happen if Ginger testifies:

And here's national press coverage illustrating the depth of the mistrust of outsiders and intellectuals, a sentiment that boils down to––"don't tell me what to do in my backyard, especially if they're lynching people in my backyard."

When Ginger refuses to testify and it looks like the case is all but lost, the locals cheer Reagan's defeat from outside the courthouse. Then we're privy to a stirring, Capra-style plea on behalf of rationality and tolerance:

All of this builds to a vivid conclusion, rife with madness and Klan imagery.

Films like this ought to be in the dust-bin of history, to be extracted for purposes of derision, at how uncivilized we used to be. They used to burn books? They used to collect in mobs and wear bedsheets and follow tyrants? They needed to be told that was wrong? What a quaint, dumb, superstitious and intolerant people! And yet STORM WARNING has outlived this movie-of-the-week shelf life. It says, in vanilla terms, and with the most vanilla stars imaginable––Doris Day, Ronald Reagan, and Ginger Rogers, for godssake!––the vanilla message that kindness and moral responsibility are American qualities, and that narrow-mindedness, harassment, lying, and intimidation are anti-American. But these days, that feels like a "contentious" message. The hoods have come off, and the Klansmen are emboldened to ply their poison trade by daylight, and under more innocuous flags. The image in the film that sticks with me is this; a fleeting shot of a child whose parent has dressed them up in Kiddie Klan gear:

This image, and the film that contains it, is a 66-year-old plea. To quote Ronald Regan's D.A.: if the good do nothing, "They're gonna rip up the old laws and make new ones. They're gonna do every rotten thing they can think of doing..."

Only now does it occur to me... THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958)

Only now does it occur to me... that when weather this stifling comes around, the only solution is to watch some Southern Fried Sleaze-O-Rama! (As previously documented in my reviews of THE BIG EASY, TIGHTROPE, and THE PAPERBOY.) Today, that meant watching THE LONG, HOT SUMMER, a lurid, golden age melodrama based on three works by William Faulker ("Spotted Horses," "Barn Burning," and THE HAMLET) and featuring sweaty Paul Newman:

well-oiled n' corpulent Orson Welles:

steamy Angela Lansbury (chuggin' all the beers):

moist Joanne Woodward:

clammy Tony Franciosa (best known to me from Argento's TENEBRE!):

and damp Lee Remick:

(among other perspiring members of the Actors Studio).

Directed by Martin Ritt (HUD, HOMBRE, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD) and set to a sensationalized score by Alex North (SPARTACUS, CLEOPATRA, THE MISFITS), this is a film about handsome strange-uhs and busyin' youh-self with the vapours and the juleps and the pink lemonade, and it contains more Faulknerian sexual entrendres than you can shake a swampy, Bayou-drippin' stick at. In short, I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

Also worth mentioning is the DVD cover, which features a pull-quote from a VARIETY review:

"...Strikingly Directed...Steamy With Sex." 

Apparently confused by the review's lack of attribution (it's from an uncredited "staff" review) the DVD producers decided to go with the first name they saw: Martin Ritt. And thusly, THE LONG, HOT SUMMER's DVD cover came to feature a rave recommendation seemingly uttered from the lips of its own director!

(And if you dig Faulknerian wordplay, might I direct you toward a piece I wrote for McSweeney's last year called "Winners of the Yoknapatawpha County Spelling Bee, 1929-1940.")

Film Review: THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T (1953, Roy Rowland)

Fingers: 5,000.
Running Time: 92 minutes.
Tag-line: "The Wonder Musical of the Future!"
Notable Cast or Crew: Tommy Rettig (LASSIE, RIVER OF NO RETURN), Hans Conried ("Captain Hook" in Disney's PETER PAN, THE TWONKY, Hitchcock's SABOTAGE), Mary Healy (SECOND FIDDLE, THE YANKS ARE COMING), Peter Lind Hayes (ZIS BOOM BAH, THE SENATOR WAS INDISCREET), George Chakiris (WEST SIDE STORY, THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT).
Best One-liner: "You have no right, you have no right, To push and shove us little kids around... Now just because your throat has got a deeper voice, And lots of wind to blow it out, at little kids who dare not shout, you have no right, you have no right, to boss and beat us little kids about... just because you've whiskers on your face to shave, you treat us like a slave.."

THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T might be the most unhinged children's movie ever released by a major studio. Hell, it might be the most unhinged movie ever released by a major studio.

The studio in question was Columbia Pictures. The film carries the "Hollywood prestige" heft of producer Stanley Kramer (HIGH NOON, THE DEFIANT ONES, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER?). It was written by Allan Scott (IMITATION OF LIFE, TOP HAT) and Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, who helped envision some of the visuals. I must also mention that it is a live-action piece, and a musical as well (with music by Friedrich Hollander, a Weimar-era composer who escaped the Nazis in 1933).

I was just writing on here the other week about INNERSPACE, a Joe Dante film from 1987 that presents a well-earned anarchic world. Essentially, that film places the visual style of Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones into a live-action format. THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T does the same, but for Dr. Seuss. Let me show an inkling of what that entails:






The result is a labyrinthine nightmare that must have scarred many minds over the years, young and old. Its plot is nearly like a Kafka fairy tale––an evil piano teacher, "Dr. Terwilliker," a.k.a., "Dr. T," is obsessed with making young boys practice the piano, and in his bondage-obssessed dystopian-fantasia-world fortress (called the "Happy Fingers Institute"), he plans to capture 500 boys (hence 5,000 fingers), strip them of their identity,

and force them to play a giant piano in his... basement, I guess?

"Practice... practice... practice..."

I don't want to think about it too much. But don't worry, all of this is presented as a "bad dream"––although 97% of the movie takes place within the dream, so the frame story feels kinda tacked on, as if by a studio too skittish to release this morbid tale without qualification.

Its visuals are Seussian by-way-of Salvador Dali, like a kitschy TALES FROM HOFFMANN. It definitely held the mantle of the "creepiest and most aesthetically creative" children's movie until WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY came out in 1971.



Dr. T is played by Hans Conreid, who plays it in a lovingly "over the top" fashion, like a 1950s John Lithgow. I'm pretty sure that his performance and costume inspired another finger-obsessed character: "The Master" from MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE.

Tom Neyman as "The Master" in MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE.

It bears mentioning that the film often feels like it's addressing institutionalized pedophilia in an off-kilter way; when our hero (child actor Tommy Rettig, of LASSIE fame) comes to his mother and father figure with allegations of Dr. T's abuse, they confront the doctor but are charmed by his gifts of free cigars, cocktails, and hypnosis (!), all while he shovels money into his wall safe.

This is sufficient for the parental figures to shrug off the accusations, whereupon our hero is returned to his dungeon cell, the unnervingly named "lock-me-tight."


Yeah... I don't think I'm reading too much into this.

There's another terrifying scene, the "Elevator Song," whereupon an S&M elevator operator announces the floors of the dungeon complex (through song) like he's announcing the departments at a Macy's during Christmas season.

I told you this was scary
 
He goes on to describe the sorts of punishments in store for our hero:


This is no joke: after test screenings, they cut the elevator operator's references to "gas chambers" and "scalping devices."

But the dungeon's not all bad. You see, Dr. T hates every musician who is not a pianist, and has therefore imprisoned the rest, who spend their days performing nightmare ballets. This particular scene is a creative tour-de-force, like something out of THE RED SHOES or AN AMERICAN IN PARIS.

WEST SIDE STORY's George Chakiris is actually in there somewhere, under that green paint.


Mouth-trumpets. As in, "trumpets fused to your mouth." It's H.R. Giger-esque whimsy!


On the left is a man wearing antlers with bells hanging from them. He plays his instrument when he is choked by the man beside him.  The gents to the right are playing some kind of horn made from plungers and hookah parts.


I'm pretty sure this gong scene is referencing the Rank Organisation's logo: 

which played before all the Powell & Pressburger films, like THE RED SHOES and TALES OF HOFFMANN, both of which clearly influenced this film.


Just look at how many people are on screen at once! Damn, I love it.

It's Technicolor dance mayhem, and one of the most startlingly artistic and bizarre sequences I've ever seen. I might also refer you to THE BAND WAGON, a Vincente Minnelli musical from the same year that traffics in similar levels of beautiful madness. Apparently in 1953 Hollywood, outré was in!

Beyond the aforementioned MANOS reference, DR. T has influenced many disparate works: for instance, the title character was the inspiration for THE SIMPSONS' "Sideshow Bob," and a basket chase set-piece may have sparked Spielberg's imagination for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK:


In closing, I must say that this THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T is a tremendous achievement in filmic and theatrical artistry. It's forward-thinking and heavy-hitting in its condemnation of unchecked authority and institutionalized child abuse. In any event, I wish they'd have let Dr. Seuss put his grotesque stamp on more live-action films!

–Sean Gill